By DAVID J. HILL

“The act of getting mail is normally a mundane routine, but when you bring design into that, it is somehow enhanced.”

Gregory Delaney, clinical assistant professor

School of Architecture and Planning

Faculty mailboxes typically don’t generate much
excitement. But when they’re in a building that’s on
the National Register of Historic Places, and that’s home to
an architecture school that has a reputation for
“making,” only the best, designed in-house, will
do.

Take, for instance, the faculty mailboxes in Hayes Hall, the
recently renovated home of the School of Architecture and Planning.
These are not your typical receptacles made of metal shelving. They
are a glazed grid of etched terra cotta designed by two Department
of Architecture faculty members and a recent graduate.

Last fall saw the completion of a meticulous, multi-year
restoration project intended to recapture and re-energize Hayes
Hall’s architectural history — it was built as an
insane asylum in the late 1800s — while creating innovative
spaces befitting a 21st-century architecture and planning school.
For the school, it was important that no detail went overlooked,
including the seemingly mundane faculty mailbox.

With the reopening of Hayes Hall, school leadership has
commissioned a series of design-build competitions that will take
place over the next few years, and that encourage faculty-student
teams to collaborate with some of the school’s key industry
partners on projects to further beautify the building.
World-renowned Boston Valley Terra Cotta partnered on the faculty
mailbox project, in which 14 teams — totaling 19 faculty
members and 18 students — participated.

“This competition series provides a space to reflect upon
our deep traditions in research through making,” says Dean
Robert G. Shibley. “The mailbox competition, with the
visionary partnership of Boston Valley Terra Cotta, is an emphatic
opening statement of what’s possible when you combine
teaching with practice.”

The winning design, titled “Bibelot” — the
French word for a small decorative object or trinket — was
installed the week before classes began in late August. It was
created by Gregory Delaney, clinical assistant professor of
architecture; Erkin Özay, assistant professor of architecture;
and Nicholas Traverse, a 2016 master of architecture graduate.

Their installation features 120 individual blocks fashioned from
terra cotta clay, each weighing 22 pounds. The blocks come in four
different colors — peach, gold, green and pink.
“Getting the glaze just how we wanted it took some trial and
error. Terra cotta is an interesting material, not only in its
finished state but in its workability and process,” says
Traverse, who now works as an architectural designer and drafter at
CJS Architects in Buffalo.

The blocks were fabricated at Boston Valley Terra Cotta in
Boston, New York, which donated its time and materials. The company
has collaborated with UB architecture faculty and students on
numerous projects, and also made each of the 28,000 terra cotta
panels that form the façade of UB’s new Jacobs School
of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences building on the Buffalo Niagara
Medical Campus.

Each block in “Bibelot” is L-shaped, its long side
set at an angle to better perform as a masonry block. “We
were thinking of the history of terra cotta as masonry block in
construction,” Delaney says. “By nature of their
geometry, each block locks with its neighbor to produce a system
that doesn’t require any mortar or hardware screws between
the units and the shelves.”

What’s more, each block is inscribed with one of 42 words
that once adorned panels on the uppermost floor of the Frank Lloyd
Wright-designed Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, which
was demolished in 1950. In the Larkin building, the words appeared
in sets of three and were intended to infuse the office and its
workers with purpose, value and self-reflection. “We used the
words as a departure point to create objects of curiosity that you
often find sitting on a shelf, which is where the name Bibelot and
inspiration also came from,” Traverse says.

On the Hayes Hall mailboxes, each word is stretched vertically
to blur the line between pattern making and typography, semiotics
and cacography. (In case you were wondering, faculty were randomly
assigned to each word.)

“The school has a deep connection with the city. In
thinking of the colors and the words, we were looking for details
that could reconstruct those connections and reveal them,”
Özay says.

The installation was designed to pique viewers’ curiosity
from the corridor outside. Once inside the Boston Valley Terra
Cotta Faculty Lounge on the first floor of Hayes, the individual
words begin to materialize, inviting users to read, touch and
explore the wall.

The mailbox competition provided Boston Valley Terra Cotta with
a rare opportunity to work with the clay material on a smaller
scale than the large building facades the company is more
accustomed to, and for an interior project. “Boston Valley
jumped at the chance to be involved in a project like this where
the material we work with every day is required to comply with a
completely different set of rules and functionality,” says
John Krouse, company president.

“The exciting part about this project is that it
highlights the potential of design in our everyday lives,”
Delaney says. “The act of getting mail is normally a mundane
routine, but when you bring design into that, it is somehow
enhanced.”

Adds Özay: “It’s an event now.”

Second place in the competition was awarded to Omar Khan and
Laura Garófalo, associate professors of architecture, for
“Stratum,” a structural stack of slotted modular bricks
inspired by the geologic formation of clay strata. It was presented
to the jury as a scaled terra cotta prototype.